How is China able to provide enough food to feed its population of over 1 billion people?

Do they import food or are they self-sustainable?

By Janus Dongye, Interested in Chinese history and geography

Seeing is believing. Open your Google Earth and have a look at what is really going on in China
from above. Western media won’t normally tell you about this.

I will guide you through and point you where to look at.

Here are the coordinates:

Location 1: Ningde Bay, Fujian, China (26°43'02.8"N 119°57'45.2"E)

Our first destination is the coastal area in Fujian province.

If we zoom in, we can find millions of floating houses and cages on the sea surface.
If you look around the coastline from Zhejiang province to Guangdong province along the 1000
miles, you can see those floating cages are virtually “everywhere”.
What are those? They are actually Chinese “seafood farms”.
Instead of going out to the oceans and catching wild seafood, why not stay in the same place and
raise your own seafood? And you can actually make more money with much less effort from
raising fish, shrimps, crabs, lobsters, clams, etc.

It is not just “sea”, the Chinese farmers would find any possible open water such as reservoirs,
rivers, lakes for farming their seafood/freshwater food.
Imagine each of the cages contains tens of fishes and crabs. That’s A LOT of FISH!

So how much seafood does China consume?

It is estimated that the global demand for seafood consumption is 143.8 million tonnes per year
and China alone has the largest seafood consumption (65 million tonnes, 45% of global
consumption), followed by the European Union (13 million tonnes), Japan (7.4 million tonnes),
the United States (7.1 million tonnes) and India (4.8 million tonnes). (Source: EU SCIENCE
HUB)

As we know, both China and India have a similar population but China consumes 12 times more
seafood than India, despite the fact that India is in a better geographical position surrounded by
warmer ocean in a tropical fishing-rich region.

Among the 65 million tonnes of seafood consumed in China, only 15 million tonnes are caught
from the wild, the rest of 50 million tonnes are all raised by aquaculture “farming”. In contrast,
90% of Japanese seafood consumption is from wild catch. Thanks to seafood farming, normal
Chinese families can afford cheap seafood in their daily meal. This is a typical family get-
together dinner settings: You can see lots of them are seafood!
This vlog shows how a bigger Chinese family enjoys steamed seafood. The whole table just costs
around $120 US dollars.

Location 2: Nanxun, Huzhou, Zhejiang, China (30°46'14.5"N 120°09'02.9"E)

Our next destination is the vast flood plain of between the Yangtze River, Taihu Lake, and
Qiantang River. Thanks to the abundance of fresh water carrying nutrients from the river
upstream, this area is so productive that it has raised over 100 million people here. And it is one
of the most densely populated areas of China. This area is very similar to the flood plains in
Bangladesh, West Bengal in India, Saigon in Vietnam etc.

What have the Chinese done differently compared to other densely populated flooded plains in
India and Bangladesh?

Instead of growing rice, the Chinese have been growing a variety of “water food” that can sell at
higher prices and makes them get richer than growing rice. If you zoom in, you will find millions
of fish ponds instead of rice fields. Besides the fish ponds, you might identify lots of green trees
grown around them.
These trees are mulberry trees used for silkworm farming. Over the past two thousand years, the
Chinese have developed many sophisticated and sustainable agriculture ecosystems around these
areas. One most famous eco-cycle is the fish-mulberry tree-silk cycle as shown in the following
graph:
Chinese farmers have been exploiting the ecosystem in fish, silk farming for thousands of years
without knowing the concept of “sustainable development”. Nowadays, it is evolved into
multiple cycles of “recycling” on the same land:
However, in order to raise more fish in the pond, you need an additional aerator that pumps air
into the water, otherwise, the fishes would not have enough space to breathe. In the following
picture, the aerator is the white dot in the centre of each pond.
Having an aerator requires every fish pond to be connected to electricity. How to generate
electricity for the aerators? Yes, you are right: add solar panels on top of the fish pond.
From Google Earth, it is found that solar panel fish ponds are already taking over some of the
traditional mulberry fish ponds in China. Some of the areas in Huzhou area have already been
placed with solar panels.

Above picture: The left is the traditional mulberry fish pond. The right is the latest solar power
fish pond.

Local fishermen and farmers are actually forced to learn the latest solar technology and
sustainable techniques provided by professionals from the local Chinese government.

Why are the local Chinese governments so eager to promote high tech to the local farmers? In
order for an official to gain promotion to the next rank, he has to demonstrate his “government
performance”. Solar panel fish pond is one of the best indicators for “promotion” as it fits well in
the sustainable development initiative.

From this, you might have understood why China has dominated the world’s silk production
(84%), freshwater fish production (66%) and solar energy generation (25.8%). In the Zhejiang,
Jiangsu area, rural people eat fish almost every day. Some say that’s why people from these
regions are more clever than other regions of China.

Eco-cycle option 2: lotus root - fish

In the fish pond, you can also grow other kinds of vegetables meanwhile raising fish. One of the
most widely grown vegetables is the lotus root. China lotus root production is 11 million tonnes
which accounts for 90% of world production and 60% of the world export. Not only Chinese like
to eat them, but most of their lotus roots are also exported to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.
Lotus roots are one of my favourite vegetables too, I do hope China can promote the rest of the
world to enjoy this delicious root as well.

Eco-cycle option 3: canola oil - bee- fish & crab

You can also grow rapeseed using the same principle. Instead of using fertilizers, at each winter,
Chinese farmers dig the “nutrient mud” from the bottom of the water and stack on the bank. And
then they grow different plants such as rapeseeds or taros on the mud. After thousands of years
of continuous cultivation, the field has become something like this:
Location: Duotian(垛田镇), Xinghua, Jiangsu, China 32°56'51.9"N 119°51'50.4"E

There is no road. You can only navigate around using boats. Of course, that is why China is also
the leading world producer of rapeseed oil (22% of global production).

Not to mention the massive beekeeping industry that thrived on the rape flowers in China, China
takes over 30% of the global honey production.
Actually, one-third of the honey consumed in the US are directly or indirectly from China. To
avoid tariffs from the US, Chinese honey exporters would first export their honey to India,
Philippines and Malaysia. Then they change labels and alter them to domestic production and
sell them to the US. I’m sure this happens to other products too.
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/c...

One Third Of America's Honey May Be A Dangerous And Illegal Import From China

Besides honey, this area is also where the most famous Chinese mitten crab grew. They can sell
at $60 per kilo, therefore only the middle-class Chinese can afford this.
Location 3: Shouguang, Shandong, China (36°44'15.9"N 118°44'14.7"E)

Our third destination is the great plain area in Shandong province.

If we zoom in, we can find millions of reflecting “shiny” houses on the plain area. Try looking
around, it is “everywhere”.
What are those? They are greenhouses designed to provide regulated and controlled conditions
such as temperatures and humidity for vegetables and fruits to grow.
In the greenhouse, you can grow all kinds of different vegetables and fruits several times per
year regardless of the time of the year. That means you can get several times more vegetable and
fruit yield compared to a normal field.

For example, you need at least 52 days to grow lettuce from seeds until you can harvest them in
a greenhouse. That means you can grow 7 times each year. That is 7x efficiency.
Therefore greenhouses can significantly improve agriculture output in a limited space, which
sounds perfect to the Chinese. Eager for promotion, local Chinese government officials in
Northern China have therefore forced their constituency —the local farmers to install
greenhouses with loans from the “Chinese Rural Cooperative Bank”.

What’s worse, they also forced them to install IoT based surveillance system in their
greenhouses. Farmers are forced to be taught in a “reeducation camp” to use their mobile phones
to monitor the status in the greenhouse including CO2, light strength, soil temperature, etc.
As a result, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation, the
vegetable and fruit production and consumption of China is around 700 million tonnes, which is
40% of the world consumption. Compared to India (180 million), China achieved a 3.8x amount
of vegetable and fruit production, despite the fact that most of the population in India are claimed
to be vegetarians, despite the fact that the arable land in China is less than India. The secret key
is the greenhouse.

List of largest producing countries of agricultural commodities - Wikipedia

Thanks to the greenhouses, the Chinese can enjoy much cheaper and much more variety of
vegetables than any other country in the world all year around. You can check from the
Wikipedia, basically, China tops the chart in almost every kind of non-tropical vegetable
production, far outpacing the second place. There are vegetables that are not ranked because
they are only specific to East Asia, such as the “garlic chives” (韭菜).
Similarly, for fruit production, China tops the global chart in almost every kind of non-
tropical fruit production, far outpacing the second place as well.

I was once been pranked and called as “racist” when I invited a black friend for a summer BBQ
with lots of watermelons. I proved my innocent by showing him these statistics:

In Japan, a watermelon typically costs 2000 yen ($18) and in China, you can afford a much
larger watermelon just in 10RMB ($1.5). And watermelon in China is sweeter if it is grown in
Xinjiang. If you love watermelons or any other melons, come to China, especially Kumul in
Xinjiang.

Location 4: Lhasa, Tibet, China (29°41'52.3"N 91°09'18.6"E)

Our fourth destination is also about greenhouses but in Tibet. Use your Google Earth and
navigate to any town in Tibet. You will always find greenhouses.

I mean, the Chinese government has also forced Tibetans to build a massive amount of
greenhouses on the Tibetan plateau. Those Tibetans have no time to go to temples for
worshipping any more, instead, they have to work in the greenhouses taking care of tomatoes.
This is why Dalai Lama is not so happy to hear this.

As a result, the average vegetable prices in Tibet have reduced 90% over the past decade and
they don’t have to import vegetables from nearby provinces anymore. Most of the Tibetans can
finally afford eating watermelons. Who doesn’t like eating watermelons?

You know that most Tibetans historically only eat yak meat, milk, cheese, and bread. They
couldn’t grow anything in such a harsh climate. Only monks could have the luxury to eat
vegetables. Now it is the solid proof that the Chinese government has destroyed Tibetan culture
and forced all of them to eat vegetables and fruit.

Location 5: Kokdala, Ili, Xinjiang, China 43°43'51.2"N 80°35'21.5"E.

Kokdala is a city in northern Xinjiang, China, bordering Kazakhstan's Almaty Region to the
west. And here is the satellite image of the border between China and Kazakhstan.
And you can clearly see there are more green farms on the Chinese side. On Kazakhstan's side,
there is nothing but barren lands.
And actually, these lands are just wasted land as their soils are too acid and there is limited water
to grow any food. You can only count on the water from the melting glaciers in the surrounding
mountains. For people in Kazakhstan, it is too expensive to grow and they don’t have a big
market to sell their products. That’s why those Kazakhs in Kazakhstan decided not to cultivate
on those lands.

On the Chinese side, all the barren lands are cultivated by the special division of the Chinese
government: XPCC Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps - Wikipedia. This is a state
enterprise with a military background. XPCC has amassed 2.6 million employees and farmers
including Uyghurs and Hans and operate as a giant organisation. Therefore due to its scale, the
cost of operation can be reduced and their market can be directly connected to the whole Chinese
market.

Since the past three decades, XPCC has been sending its agriculture professionals to Israel every
year to learn Israeli’s most advanced agriculture technology in a similar desert climate. Those
Chinese students then returned to China and started cultivating those lands using the latest high
technology such as drip irrigation etc. Once they found those technologies can actually mature
into profits, they would sell some of the newly cultivated lands to local Uyghur, Han, and
Kazakhs families or hire them directly in the cooperations.

Some of these Uyghurs, Kazakhs are sent to the reeducation camps and they are forced to learn
Mandarin Chinese and the latest drip irrigation techniques to save water and reduce costs.
Moreover, each village is assigned with one or more communist party members to guide them
through to make sure that they don’t mess up the newly cultivated land.

Yes, the drip irrigation technique can significantly reduce water usage and cost. Thanks to the
Israeli and domestic Chinese technology, they make the barren land in Xinjiang more and more
fertile and productive.
So what are those people growing on the new land?

Tomatoes, chillies, melons, grapes, and cotton. All of them can sell higher prices than wheat.
Thanks to the strong sunlight and cold night in Xinjiang, those products are normally sweeter
and tastier, so that they can sell really good prices in the whole market of China and the world. In
China, people prefer to buy fruits from Xinjiang than the rest of China because of its great taste
and quality.

Actually, agriculture efficiency is so high in Xinjiang that it produces much more than the
Chinese market actually needs. Instead of relying on the “free market” causing the prices to drop
and hurt those Uyghur farmers, XPCC, as a state enterprise, is pushing to sell those products to
the rest of the world at higher prices or to more countries.

What if the rest of the country doesn’t want to buy the products?

The communist XPCC is relying on China’s “superpower” to force those customers from the rest
of the world to buy using some terms and conditions that you can’t refuse. This strategy is
learned from the USA agriculture business model. This is exactly what the US has been
doing. And this is what “state capitalism” is about. Whenever Xi Jinping is visiting a country, he
is also in charge of selling those products to the country by signing “free trade” agreement using
carrots and “implicit sticks”.

If you are not convinced, let us move to the next location for more proof:

Location 6: Hejing, Bayingol, Xinjiang, China 42°18'36.1"N 86°36'15.4"E

What are those “red” lands in the middle of the desert?
If we zoom in, you can see it is actually the land of “tomatoes” — billions of tomatoes. You can
imagine their scales by measuring the total area.
Next time when you enjoy Italian spaghetti, Turkish kebab, or spreading Heinz ketchup on your
chips, think about that, you might eat tomatoes from Xinjiang. It might not directly say the
tomatoes are from Xinjiang. These tomatoes might be first exported to a third country and get
rebranded just like the honey.

Your Ketchup Probably Came from Xinjiang | Xinjiang: Far West China

China produces 56.3 million tonnes of tomatoes and dominates the world’s 1/3 tomato exports.
Over 14 million are from Xinjiang. You can verify this by looking at the global top ten ketchup
companies The World's Leading Producers of Tomatoes:

 COFCO Group (China) 2nd

 Xinjiang Chalkis Co. Ltd (China) 3rd
 Fuyuan Agriculture Products Limited (China) 6th
 Heinz (United States) 7th
 Xinjiang Tianye Co., Ltd. (China) 15th

These companies are more or less the redistributors from the XPCC and the Chinese
government. These companies can actually return most of the profits back to the Xinjiang
farmers. And just recently the Chinese government is trying to sell Xinjiang tomatoes to eastern
Europe through the one belt one road initiative. As Xi Jinping just visited Italy this March 2019,
I am not sure whether Italy is interested in Xinjiang’s tomato or not after Xi Jinping’s visit at this
time. The western media will never tell you.

Besides tomatoes and chillis, China is also the largest producer of grapes, accounting for 19.1%
of global production. And the most and the best of grapes are from Turpan, Xinjiang. However,
China really sucks at making wines from grapes.
Finally, let’s talk about the main crops such as rice, wheat, and corns in China. They are the
most important food of all, not only to human beings but also to animals such as pigs, chickens,
and cattle that produce meat and milk.

Here is a simple comparison between the top four producers across the world:

Arable Land: China 1086 India 1579 EU 1091 US 1631 (1000 km2)
Rice: China 208.1 India 169.5 EU 3.1 US 9.2 (million tonnes)
Wheat: China 134.3 India 98.5 EU 150.2 US 47.3 (million tonnes)
Corn: China 257.3 India 26.0 EU 60.9 US 366.2 (million tonnes)

As you can see, China is an all-around top crop producer compared to the other three regions.
However, for a population of 1.4 billion, this is enough to be “filling” but still far from enough if
the Chinese want to achieve similar “well-fed” status in per-capita consumption in terms of the
developed country standard just like the EU and US.

Currently, there is just not enough arable land for China to produce enough crops to raise 1.4
billion people to the well-fed status. And what’s worse, the arable land in China is quickly
shrinking as more and more land has been used for industries and cities.

Location 7: Xingtai, Hebei, China 37°35'54.1"N 114°55'20.8"E

To show you how the Chinese were quickly using up their precious land, our next destination is
the great northern plain of China. This is where the most crop is grown in China. (Picture scale:
top to down 1500km)

If we zoom in to any location in the plain, for example, the Xingtai city, a 4th tier city, a “small”
city with 7 million people. (Picture scale: top to down 60km).
This is actually quite scary to many people. The green fields are the farmlands. These white dots
are actually villages. Each “dot” contains around 500 people. The larger white regions are towns
with around 10k to 100k people.

As you can see, as more and more people are getting rich and building large houses on the
farmlands, those green land would be running out gradually. It is estimated that China is losing
around 3,000 km2 area of arable land every year. Those arable land would be turned into “white”
and dead concrete land. This is obviously a disaster and the Chinese government has been trying
every effort to regulate the land uses. However, you just can’t control the huge momentum of
“urbanisation” so easily.

Location 8: Qingyang, Gansu, China 35°41'00.7"N 107°40'38.3"E

The lack of arable land has been the “top concern” since the CCP governs China ever since.
From the era of Mao Zedong, the CCP has been organising massive cultivations on hilly lands on
different parts of China. There are countless examples. Here is the most significant one: Loess
Plateau
This 640,000 km² plateau is actually not suitable for growing crops. But if you zoom in, you can
see all the valleys, all the hills are converted to arable lands. From above, all the cultivated lands
appeared like “roots”.
Just zoom in to any place, you would find all the hills are converted to terraces.
However, people have found that creating too much terraced land would cause land degradation
and destructive mudslide during the monsoon season. From year 1999, the CCP realised that its
previous massive cultivation campaign does not improve crop production significantly but
instead has caused many floods and mudslides, then it halted the cultivation and proposed the
“Returning Farmland to Forest Program (退耕还林)” campaign.

For those lands with low yield, farmers are forced to give up their land and they have to grow
trees on them. And for the farmers who lost the land, the government would compensate the
farmers with a fee that is equivalent to the field earnings.
The above picture shows the impact of the forestation and afforestation. This is proof that after
many lessons, the CCP has gradually grasped the key to sustainable development.
Xi Jinping once said: “China highly values ecological and environmental protection. Guided by
the conviction that lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets, the country advocates
harmonious coexistence between humans and nature, and sticks to the path of green and
sustainable development.”

These are not empty words. Every “words” are backed by actual actions. Many people outside
China may wonder why mainland Chinese still prefer Xi Jinping. One of the reasons is that he
restructured the old bureaucracy of China to be more “environment focused”. For example, the
local environmental officials now have the authority to impeach local mayors if the region has
done badly in sustainable development.

The outcome of “Returning Farmland to Forest Program” is definitely causing the reduction of
the arable land in China. However, despite the arable land degradation, thanks to the huge
investment in agriculture technology, agriculture efficiency still improves, making its domestic
crop production still increase.

One example is the new technology that allows you to grow rice using salty sea water.
An 87-year-old scientist may have just unlocked the secret to growing rice in saltwater

Chinese scientists may have just found a new way to feed 200 million people

Despite the domestic crop production increase, China is still not self-sustainable in terms of rice,
wheat, and corn. It has to import 10% of its annual consumption from the rest of the world.
However, most of them are not directly for human consumption.

Example 1: Beer and Baijiu production

Since 2006, China has become the world's largest producer of beer with 46.5438 million
kiloliters, which is more than double that of the US. It has increased production by 4.9%
annually. Besides wheat, China has to import most of the hop plant for beers from Germany and
the USA.

And China is also the world’s leading producer of spirit alcohol. The Chinese might not favor
Whiskey or Volta. Most of them drink Baiju, which is more fragrant and rich in flavour. The
Baiju production is around 13.6 million kiloliters, which is much more than western people can
consume. And the local rice wine made by individual Chinese households is not even counted!
As a result, some part of China has a much heavier drinking culture that the rest of the world is
not even aware of. Let me tell you. It is much heavier than the British and the Russians.

Example 2: Pig and pork production

Global pork production

The above graph just shows how do the Chinese love pork so much. Some of the pigs raised in
China fed on the corns imported from the USA and Brazil. This also applies to the chickens,
cattle and other animals raised in China.

Conclusion

China is able to provide enough food more than just plain rice or wheat. The variety of food
offered on the Chinese table is much more diverse and cheaper than most developed places in the
world. This applies to “poor people” as well. This is based on my personal experiences and
observations after traveling from many countries in Europe, the US, and Japan.

For example, in China, a group of eight people can sit at a round table, enjoying 20 different
dishes including different meat, vegetables, dessert etc. They don’t have to worry about religious
restrictions, allergic concerns, and personal spaces.
In Shandong, the total dinner costs around $50. The same set of 20 dishes could cost $150 in
Beijing/Shanghai/Taipei or $300 in California/Japan/Hong Kong etc. And we are not counting
the beers and drinks. Actually, most people in California/Japan don’t have the luxury to enjoy 20
different dishes at all but it is more than common in China.

After this extremely long post, I hope you could learn something new about China and also know
how can the Chinese feed themselves more than just “enough”.

Thanks for reading :)